IT is difficult to get away from the weather just now and if you are under 15 that’s probably the way it should be.

There is nothing better than snowballs, snowmen, sledging and making slides and, with all the schools closing down, more often because the older users, that is the teachers, can’t make it in, the children are having a rare old time of it.

Or at least you would think so, but as an old fogey staggering slowly about the icy pavements with socks over my shoes — it’s an old trick but it sometimes works — I have to say no one has lobbed a snowball at me yet.

And I would have made the perfect, slow-moving target for me when I was a snowbound schoolboy. But in those long-ago days schools never closed, worst luck.

Mine even opened early to get the boiler going and get in the coal from the outside bunker to ensure the headmistress’s fire was burning bright.

The idea of the school being closed by snow — and I include the great blizzards of 1962/63 — did not enter anyone’s head.

The mailman delivered his post, the milkman came calling, the mobile grocery shop was there at 10am as usual and Miss Temple was waiting at the boys’ gate of the school — girls had their own entrance — telling everyone to stop throwing snowballs and not to make ice slides in the playground.

No one threw a snowball at Miss Temple, who was always dressed all in black and seemed to be about 150 years-old.

I walked to school along a railway line which I crossed as a short cut that took me along a canal, frozen solid, and across a main road. There was no school bus.

We threw snowballs at each other, old people, cows, sheep, birds, passing vehicles, trains, trees, pedestrians and policemen.

We shoved snow down our friends’ backs; we lay in the snow and made life-like impressions of ourselves; we took off our sodden woolly gloves and watched our fingers go blue and walked around like penguins with about two pounds of solid ice in each wellie and the same again in the pockets of our raincoats. There were always at least two dogs included in our ‘gang’ and watching their bewilderment as a snow ‘ball’ melted away when they caught it only added to the fun.

Of course, looking back now through watery eyes and sepia-tinted glasses, it all seems such harmless, Dennis the Menace, boys-will-be-boys fun.

Trying lobbing a snowball at a policeman today and you would be captured on CCTV before it hit its target, brought up before the Beak, given an ASBO, curfew and made to wear some sort of ankle bracelet that bleeps if you enter High Street.

If you allowed your children to walk alone to school beside a railway line, let alone a canal, you would probably have them taken away from you and put in a home.

Which is probably why you hardly see any youngsters having innocent or even not-so-innocent fun in the white stuff — unless of course they are under the watchful eye of parents and adults, which rather defeats the whole object of the exercise.

Instead they are warm and cosy in the back bedroom playing virtual snow games on their own.

I suppose as a prime target for any snowball thrower I ought to be grateful — but I can’t help feeling a little sad too.​